Illuminating the loves and lives, the desires and ambitions of these characters with compassion, wit, and intelligence, The Night Watchman is a majestic work of fiction from this revered cultural treasure. In the Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature. Thomas and Patrice live in this impoverished reservation community along with young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother Juggie Blue, her niece and Patrice’s best friend Valentine, and Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is hopelessly in love with Patrice. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life. Vera may have disappeared she hasn’t been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Patrice’s shameful alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids.

Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans “for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run”? The bill is a “termination” that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom Congress is fed up with Indians. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new “emancipation” bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman. Winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

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